Quietly, he ran to the bedroom door and then he was gone, off down the stairs, his body pressed to the wall, waving the knife in front of him. Thea shakily got to her knees. As much as she would have liked to have stayed where she was, to curl up into a ball and try to block out everything she’d just seen, she had to follow him. There was no one else to do it. Her shoulder was beginning to throb, a dull drum beat punctuated by the occasional top note of needling pain and she felt tears forming, hot and stinging.

She would not cry. She would get up, she told herself, like a nanny to a recalcitrant child. She would stand. See? There she was – she was standing. Now she would walk to the door. It was not so far away, not so much of an effort. There was nothing wrong with her apart from the shoulder; her legs and feet were fine. See? She was at the door. How easily that had happened. Now she would walk down the stairs even though her knees were a bit wobbly and her shoulder a bubble of pain. Hopefully, by the time she got to the bottom, Ethan would not have killed himself and she could get the damn knife away from him.

And throw it far out into the snow.

She staggered into the kitchen, bracing herself for she didn’t know what, with nothing to defend herself, shaking and alone, to find …

… Ethan asleep on the floor, curled up around the knife as if it was a cuddly toy. Peaceful again.

She bent down and quickly slipped it out of his grasp before she allowed herself to crumple to the floor next to him.

Chapter 34

There was so much blood.

It wasn’t so much the amount of it that was making Thea feel sick, but rather the doughy, fleshy flap of skin Ethan was gouging out of his head.

She hadn’t been able to stop him this time. It was the morning of the next day. Before she could finish describing his hallucination, he had been halfway to the knife in the cutlery drawer. They were currently sitting on the floor in the bedroom.

Head wounds bled. A lot. She’d read that somewhere. Something about the fact that there are numerous blood vessels and so even a minor cut could cause major bleeding. What Ethan was doing was not a minor cut though: he was digging into the skin around the disc on his temple, blood running down his cheek, his jaw trembling, his hand trembling, Thea trembling for him.